


La Vita Nuova

by elena0206



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Family Loss, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Light Angst, Minor Character(s), Past Character Death, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 20:53:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9022066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elena0206/pseuds/elena0206
Summary: An exploration of Allegra Pazzi's life after the events of TWOTL.  She was about to leave when she noticed the tall silhouette of a man standing on the same side of the bridge as her, leaning over the parapet, and watching the water race by. The man looked up at her after she had taken a few steps in his direction, and Allegra recognized him almost instantly, the same way one would recognize a bee sting on back of the neck – with pain, surprise, and the overwhelming need to remove it. “Signora Pazzi!” the man said, and the way her last name slipped off his lips made Allegra feel like all of her scars have become open wounds again. “What a pleasant surprise!”  Allegra smiled, as best as she could. As best as she knew how to. “Agent Crawford. What brings you here?”





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caveat_Lector](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caveat_Lector/gifts).



> This fic is my gift for the lovely caveat_lector who wanted to see a minor character explored. Happy holidays and all the best for the upcoming year! ♥ I hope you'll enjoy this. :) 
> 
> Special thanks to [SveaShan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/SveaShan) for being a relentless source of support, and to he-s-dead-jim for helping me out with the Italian sentences. Thank you both so much! 
> 
> All translations can be found in the end note. 
> 
> Enjoy! ♥

_Weep you lovers, since Love is also weeping,_

_and hear the reason that makes him full of tears._

* * *

“Buon Natale, Signora Pazzi!”

“Buon Natale, Antonio!”

Allegra Pazzi smiled at her students’ festive cheerfulness, and left the ballroom after casting one last fond glance toward the group of teens. The sound of music followed her on the hallway, muffled like a fading afterthought, and no less surreal than outside voices piercing through the veil of a dream. Her frail smile dropped into an expression of exhaustion as soon as she stepped outside into the icy air.

“Signora Pazzi! Aspetti!”

She recognized the voice, but it had been a long, long day. She recognized it, and it was Giulia, one of the first year students that Allegra had a soft spot for. Despite all muscles in her legs pulling her away from the parking lot, and as far as possible from there, Allegra stopped, and turned around slowly.

“Vuole che le diamo un passaggio a casa?” the girl asked with a demure smile, pointing at someone sitting in the driver’s seat – her father, Allegra thought.

 “No, grazie,” she answered with tactful gentleness, and the corners of her lips curved briefly, but did not sustain a full smile for more than a moment. “Mi piace camminare.”

The girl nodded, and looked down while brushing a few stray strands of hair away from her face. She didn’t seem convinced just yet.

“Giulia?” Allegra called out. “Non dimenticarti la lista di letture per le vacanze invernali.”

“Ci sta rovinando il Natale, Signora Pazzi!” Giulia said, feigning a childish scowl that soon broke into laughter. She waved goodbye, entered the car almost hurriedly, lest her teacher recalls even more school work, and her father drove away.

Allegra started walking too, following their car’s red taillights as they faded in the distance, and became nothing more than two bright spots of color splashed onto a dark landscape among thousands of other bright spots. They mixed and mingled and danced, as if in a hypnotic game of thimblerig, and Florence, in all its impish wintry darkness, played the role of the deceitful shuffler challenging unwitting passersby to make bets they could never win.

It was a short walk until her apartment, but instead of heading home, Allegra found herself wandering on less familiar streets and narrow alleys that led her to the Christmas market. The focal point of everyone’s attention at this time of the year, it was pulsing with life, townspeople and tourists alike wandering around, mesmerized by the sumptuous spectacle of light and color. She did not stop there. The bleak emptiness Allegra knew she would have found at home steered her even farther away, until the central part of the city. She walked past historical buildings, marvelous displays of craftsmanship from ancient architects, and past modern buildings, many of them devoid of grandeur and aestheticism, but valuable all the same in their barren concrete-gray utilitarianism. She walked past statues and walls covered in graffiti. Past museums and grocery stores, universities and tobacco shops. Art galleries, cathedrals, basilicas. She walked until the melody that had been playing in the ballroom was but a fruitless, distant memory, and stopped on Ponte Santa Trìnita.

The air was softer there, the ripple from below steady and serene. The sky – a dark mass stretching in all directions, hiding behind roofs and towers.  Allegra felt light and foggy, as if she were watching the world around her from within the confined fragility of a soap bubble. She stood there for a long time, head void of thoughts, taking in all that Florence had to offer that night, with both palms pressed flat on the stony parapet of the bridge.

She was about to leave when she noticed the tall silhouette of a man standing on the same side of the bridge as her, leaning over the parapet, and watching the water race by. The man looked up at her after she had taken a few steps in his direction, and Allegra recognized him almost instantly, the same way one would recognize a bee sting on back of the neck – with pain, surprise, and the overwhelming need to remove it.

“Signora Pazzi!” the man said, and the way her last name slipped off his lips made Allegra feel like all of her scars have become open wounds again. “What a pleasant surprise!”

Allegra smiled, as best as she could. As best as she knew how to. “Agent Crawford. What brings you here?”

“Christmas can be a lonely time at home. Psychopaths and case files are hardly good company on holidays.”

He paused, a smirk frozen on his face.

Allegra felt compelled to force a smile too, and wondered if Jack Crawford was aware his sense of humor had lapsed into something warped at his own expense. Or perhaps it had always been this way, she thought, and this trailed into the realization of how little she knew the man before her, and that the little she knew was only by proxy – through her late husband, news articles, and other people’s stories of what he seemed to be. But between that and what Jack Crawford actually was stretched a gap filled only by speculations and vague conclusions based on bits and pieces snatched from the depths of arbitrary subjectivity.

Allegra settled, not without a dose of rancor, that she didn’t want to know those truths about Jack Crawford that had no bearing on her own life.

With his solemn composure regained, he added, “I feel closer to my wife’s memory here,” as a clarification more than a way to steer the conversation away from the uneasy direction it was heading towards. His eyes flickered to the left, over Arno, as if his wife’s memory were a single dense point in space, and he had to make sure it was still there, where he’d seen in the last time.

She understood the implications of staring down at the dark water beneath them when talking about his wife. She wanted to ask Jack if he knew Bella’s remains had long left Florence, and were now somewhere in the Lingurian Sea, or in the belly of a fish, or integrated in the river bed. Ask if he knew his wife had become a permanent part of the unbridled waters that had flooded the city time after time, taking blameless lives and destroying invaluable cultural heritage. _“Do you know how many people scatter the ashes of their loved ones in Florence every year?”_ she’d have asked. _“Many,”_ Jack would’ve answered, and _many_ they were. Did they not care that they’d entrusted the fickle malice of these tumultuous waters with the last physical remains of their beloveds? Did they not care that their place of remembrance was a touristic attraction – a largely popular one – with people, strangers, passing by each day?

They did not care, and nor did Jack Crawford, not enough for Allegra to allow herself the immediacy of vindictiveness and voice these thoughts out loud.

“Take your time,” she offered with cordiality. “I was about to leave.”

“I would love to pay you a visit tomorrow morning,” Jack said, in a way so deliberate that it made Allegra feel it was a visit Jack had decided to make long before he’d even arrived in Florence. “If you don’t mind.”

An imperfect silence settled between the two of them. And with it, the understanding that their encounter was not accidental, and that refusing to sit down and talk with Jack Crawford was not an option, not when he was the one pivotal element that could put a break to the absurd string of events that had happened years ago, and kept happening still through unbridled memories and cruel dilemmas.

The air was cold and Allegra’s eyes stung.

“Please do,” she said after watching him for a few long moments. “Christmas can be a lonely time here as well.”

Jack nodded, and Allegra walked past him.

“Have you moved since we last spoke?”

His question stopped Allegra, but she did not turn around. _Has she moved?_ Out, away, on? Neither.

“No. I did not.” Her voice was sharp, assertive. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a bus to catch. Buona notte, Agent Crawford.”

* * *

The bus ride home seemed infernally long. When Allegra had finally arrived, the first thing she did was to pour herself a glass of wine, only for it to end up shattering on the kitchen floor minutes later. She watched the red liquid slithering on the floor tiles and filling the gaps between them. Only when the wine stains had started to dry and her fingertips had turned white from holding so hard on the edge of the countertop did Allegra clean up the shards of glass.

It was late when she had gone to bed, and a million different things were on her mind as she fell asleep.

* * *

“Thank you,” Jack Crawford said as he took the small cup of coffee Allegra had placed in front of him. It was plain white, save for a delicate golden line circling the cup just below the rim.

Despite the years that had passed, the apartment was still recognizable in Jack’s memory. The placement of the furniture was the same; the wallpaper was brighter, the carpets larger, but essentially it was the same space. The same warm energy filling the same homey space.

“You’ve redecorated.”

“As one does.”

“But you haven’t remarried.”

Allegra took a long breath in, but even air felt bitter and painful.

“It was the second marriage for both Rinaldo and I,” she began. “We had known each other for years before we decided to get married. We were so hopeful.” The faintest shade of a smile brushed over her lips. “We used to think we were defying fate, in our own way. By choosing each other’s company over loneliness.”

She acknowledged, as the words kept leaving her lips, that after all these years she still wanted – _she needed_ – to talk to someone about Rinaldo, about their peaceful, albeit short married life, about what had happened to him. She needed to share, to discuss, to let all the thoughts clashing in her mind out.

“I’m only now beginning to realize that fate was indeed defied, but not by us. Not by loving each other, but by someone else getting in the way of the love we were supposed to find anyway.”

Jack listened to her in silence, for behind the thin tower of steam rising slowly from his cup of coffee. When it was his turn to speak, he cleared his throat and straightened his back, slightly pushing the sides of his brown blazer back.

“I’ve never had the chance to give you my condolences,” he said. “I’m sorry about your husband.”

Allegra nodded, as if she hadn’t even heard him. “Do you know what the press made out of it?”

“Not for sure, but I can imagine.”

“They said it was suicide. They went as far as to say that he killed himself because he was having a love affair.” An exasperated grin spread on her face, froze as she paused, and then turned into an anguished grimace. “Not once has Hannibal Lecter’s name been mentioned. As far as the Italian press is concerned, Lecter has never even been in Florence.”

Jack remained silent, and his silence annoyed Allegra. It annoyed her that saying all of this out loud didn’t make her feel any better. Her stomach was a painful knot, and her throat dry and bitter. She pressed her fingers on the dark red table cloth, evening out a fold that wasn't there.

"Why are you here, Agent Crawford?"

"Jack," he corrected, and by doing so he could feel the barrier that was palpably erected between the two of them breaking apart and collapsing on him. "I'm not here on official business."

“You weren’t on official business the last time we met either, were you?”

“I thought I should pay you a visit to talk about recent happenings."

She blinked slowly, keeping her eyes closed for a second longer than necessary. "You're here to tell me about Lecter and Graham."

Jack’s silence was enough of a confirmation for Allegra.

“I’m as up to date as I can be,” she said. “I’ve read the news. I’ve read Tattle Crime. I’ve seen the video you released. I’ve been in touch with victims’ families.”

“You’ve been in touch?”

“Marissa Schurr’s mother. Jeremy Olmstead’s cousins. Andrew Caldwell’s wife and son. Michelle Vocalson’s girlfriend. Beverly Katz’s siblings.”

Having heard the last name made Jack allow his gaze to slip from Allegra’s face to the almost empty cup of coffee in front of him. If it had ever occurred to him to check up on Beverly’s family after her funeral, this thought never took enough substance to find its place in the real world.

“I didn’t know that,” he said, barely audible.

“How would you have known? We’re not spreading flyers and selling _Hannibal Lecter Ruined My Life_ badges.”

Allegra smiled, meant as a confirmation that it was okay for Jack to laugh at her joke, which he did – tentatively slow and heavy with the burden of insight.

“If you ever decide to sell those badges, I’d like to order ten of them.”

She let out a breathy chuckle. “I’ll make sure they knit a sweater for you as well.”

Jack rummaged through his memory, trying to remember the way Allegra used to laugh, and although he couldn’t quite identify the sound and look of it, he was sure it was different. Her eyes had a restless light to them that hadn’t been there before. And her lips – her lips seemed to have discovered a new gravitational pull, a stronger one that always dragged them downwards whenever a smile dared to creep up on Allegra’s face.

“The day he was sentenced, I drove three hours to my mother’s place, and I cried in her arms like a small child. Not of relief, but because until then, until I knew for sure he was locked in prison, I couldn’t grieve. And then, it was over. Not with a bang, but with a few lines on the international news section of a local newspaper. I was overcome by a sadness I hadn’t felt before, not even when the police came to tell me Rinaldo was dead.”

She wasn’t looking at Jack as she spoke, but at an empty space on the chair opposite of her at the other end of the table. If it was a dialogue more than a monologue, Jack wasn’t the other half of it. That was fine by him. He didn’t need to be.

“A few days later I reached out to family and friends of other victims. We decided to meet. At first, every three months, and then biannually. We found solace in one another. Those gaps left behind after our dear ones were so brutally taken away from us started to fill up.”

She stopped. The pause was growing and stretching, almost to the point where it became unbearable. Allegra rubbed her forehead and the narrow arches of her eyebrows with her fingertips.

Looking over, Jack noticed that the silver watch on Allegra’s wrist was almost three minutes ahead of his own. Or perhaps his watch was almost three minutes behind. Time did feel different in Florence. It felt denser, with the quality of antediluvian infinitude.

“One night, a few months ago, our lives were rewritten. _Again_ ,” Allegra continued, and her voice – soft and calm until that point – was now on the verge of cracking. “Hannibal Lecter escaped. There would be more victims.” She knitted her brows, and her lips twitched slightly. “Beverly Katz’s youngest sister called to tell me. She was crying so hard, harder than I’ve ever heard her before. We all were.”

Warm yellow light fell on Allegra’s face, and quivered in short motions as the candle lit on an end table became a pool of hot liquid held together by a painted glass. It looked like something a child would have made.

Allegra sighed, her chest rising and falling in broad waves, and closed her eyes.

“And then nothing.”

A weary heaviness settled over both of them as Allegra’s last words echoed in Jack’s mind. His fingers found the cup of coffee, but it was empty, so Jack put it down again with a clink of porcelain touching porcelain.

“You don’t believe he’s dead.” A statement so heavy with implications that even Jack was taken aback by how nonchalant it sounded.

He slowly pushed the cup away from him, watching his own movements, but not registering any of them, and folded his hands on the table. When he looked up at the other, he noticed she was watching him with an indecipherable expression on her face. A strange amalgam of inattentiveness, malaise, and apprehension.

“Do you?” she asked, voice unfaltering.

“I have reasons to believe that he–” He stopped, and reconsidered his words for a moment. “That _they_ may be in Florence as we speak.”

All of a sudden Allegra’s whole body clenched, and a cold shiver dripped down from scalp to spine, from spine to legs. Her lungs felt all too tight to breathe. She rose from her seat, and took a few hesitant steps, as if she could run away from what she’d just heard.

She stopped in front of a wide window with beige drapes pulled away to the sides.

"We buried our dead before they finished talking," she said, low now, akin to a whisper. "Those who got left behind were reduced into silence by the very nature of these crimes."

"Unspeakable horrors are just that. _Unspeakable_."

“You can’t blame a disease. You can’t blame an accident. But these are murders. Not only they are murders, but they’ve also been swept under the carpet. There are people to blame for that. You are one of the people I’m blaming, Jack. If not for your misdeeds, then for your lack of reaction when a reaction from you was needed. You can’t give the devil wings, and expect him to land on your fly trap.”

A light snowfall had started outside while they’ve been talking. There was barely any wind, and large snowflakes were falling down from the clouds almost vertically, forming a thin white blanket over the frozen ground. Most of the street was concealed by the large cedar tree growing in front of the apartment building, but Allegra knew the children were outside. They never missed the chance to play with snow, no matter how little of it there was.

It was a young neighborhood; mostly young couples with a child or two lived there. Being part of this community, it was expected of her, as she’d been told numerous times, to either remarry and make a family of her own _before it was too late_ , or grieve the loss of her late husband for the rest of her life. There was no middle ground for her neighbors and for some of her other acquaintances. Family and close friends knew that Allegra had never planned to have children, not with Rinaldo or anyone else. She decided it was for the best not to waste energy on trying to explain herself for people who weren’t willing to listen anyway. A heartbreaking tragedy leaving a woman emotionally scarred for the rest of her life and unable to find a new partner – that, they could understand. A woman willingly childless – they could not.

Despite all this, they had never managed to make Allegra feel out of place. With or without a partner, with or without children of her own, there was life to be lived, and Allegra was doing just that.

“Why did you let him go, Jack?” she asked suddenly with her back still turned on him.

Jack’s head felt heavy, and he rested his chin on folded hands, elbow pressed firmly on the table and legs crossed underneath his chair. “Because it was… personal. Because I was trying to pull someone out of depths he willingly swam into.”

“Will Graham.”

“Yes.”

Standing in front of the window with her arms crossed, Allegra was a colorless silhouette against the bright white background. She reminded Jack of Bella, in a way both torturous and awe-inspiring. He came to Florence to be closer to Bella, but he did not expect to see parts of her in another woman.

“ _What the wicked dread will overtake them._ They might as well be each other’s punishment,” Allegra muttered. There were tears glistening on her lower eyelids, threatening to pour over and roll down her cheeks.

She took both cups of coffee off the table, and headed for the kitchen, leaving Jack alone. Christmas songs reached to them when Allegra had returned to the living room. _Tu scendi dalle stelle_ and _Adeste Fideles_ peacefully playing from the apartment underneath Allegra’s.

With each minute passing by, there were more and more things to be said. Heavy things, horrible things, things too dark and complicated, and only small things slipped between a heartbeat and another.

“Looks like it’s going to be a white Christmas after all,” Jack remarked, staring at the window.

Allegra shook her head in agreement, but decided against delving into a conversation about weather   and Christmas just yet.

“I hated you, you know? I hated you for a very long time,” she said, drawing Jack’s attention back to her. “I blamed you for what happened, and for what could have been avoided but wasn’t. When we met last evening, I wanted nothing more than for you to go to hell and leave me alone.”

To Allegra’s surprise, Jack let out a short chuckle, which in turn made her smile and mellow the tone of her voice.

“I needed to point all my rage and frustration at someone,” she continued. “Since you were so far away, so intangible, more of a concept than a real man, it was easy to hate you. But here you are now, and here I am, finding it difficult to even fathom the thought of hating you.”

Jack’s smile faded as he looked down, and nodded with gratitude. “Now that you don’t hate me anymore, will you please do me a favor?”

* * *

A considerable amount of snow was already coating the cemetery Jack and Allegra visited. The cold late afternoon wind rustled branches from the large evergreen above them, and snow fell down on their heads, sticking to their hair, before ultimately melting away. Rinaldo Pazzi’s grave was decorated with an assortment of flowers Jack had insisted to bring.

Allegra had given him a few minutes alone at the grave, while she wandered on the main alley, watching the bellowing gray clouds. Despite keeping both hands in her coat’s pockets, she could still feel the painful cold numbing them. It was colder than Christmas had been the previous year. Colder still than the last Christmas she spent with Rinaldo.

“How long will you be staying in Florence?” she asked when Jack had joined her on the walk towards the exit. She was starting to see in Jack what Rinaldo had seen in him a long time ago.

He raised his eyebrows as if he was considering the idea for the first time. “As long Florence allows me to stay,” he answered.

Allegra shoot him a confused look, tilting her head to the side. “Oh?”

“I have retired from the FBI. Bought a little flat not too far from here.”

Allegra stopped dead in her tracks. “Agent Crawford. You should have told me about this sooner,” she scolded with a playful grin before starting to walk again, but even then Jack could still sense a twinge of sorrow in her voice. “I must get you a housewarming gift.”

“You don’t have to. It can barely be considered a home at the moment since I’m yet to unpack.”

“I insist. When Rinaldo and I moved into our apartment, we received toilet paper from our friends. It represents the hope that all problems with the new home will be as easy to solve as spooling out the paper roll.”

Jack laughed, and his shoulders shook with mirth. “I can’t imagine the housewarming party you must throw in order to receive toilet paper as a gift.”

“I’m kidding, Jack.” She shook her head. “We got an espresso machine.”

“A shame. I was starting to get excited for toilet paper.”

“How about some plants?”

“And what does that represent?”

“That there will always be life in your home.”

* * *

“Thank you,” Jack whispered after they walked through the large iron gates, placing a gentle hand on Allegra’s shoulder.

She flashed a thin smiled at him, but didn’t say anything back.

They entered Allegra’s car, and she drove away slowly. Jack had agreed to come over for dinner, and spend the Christmas evening with Allegra and her mother. There were still things to be said, and a lot to clarify, but Allegra and Jack both agreed that it could all wait until after Christmas. Or maybe until after the New Year.

A few red zinnia petals flew off Rinaldo Pazzi’s grave, and landed on an angel statue nearby, quiet and unseen, as the snow kept on falling. 

**Author's Note:**

> Translations:  
> Buon Natale = Merry Christmas  
> Signora Pazzi! Aspetti! = Miss Pazzi! Wait!  
> Vuole che le diamo un passaggio a casa? = Would you like us to drive you home?  
> No, grazie = No, thank you  
> Mi piace camminare = I enjoy walking  
> Non dimenticarti la lista di letture per le vacanze invernali = Don’t forget the reading list for this winter break  
> Ci sta rovinando il Natale, Signora Pazzi! = You’re ruining Christmas, Miss Pazzi!  
> Buona notte = Good night  
> Tu scendi dalle stele = You Come Down from the Stars  
> Adeste Fideles = O Come, All Ye Faithful
> 
> ***
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and happy holidays everyone! ♥


End file.
